W;T
: A Play by
Margaret Edson
W;t
is that rare beast: art that engages both the heart and the mind.
"It is not my intention to give away the plot," Vivian
Bearing, Ph.D., announces near the beginning of Margaret Edson's Pulitzer
Prize-winning play, "but I think I die at the end. They've
given me less than two hours." For two hours, this famed
Donne scholar takes center stage, interrupting her doctors,
nurses, and students to explicate her own story, its metaphors and
conceits. Recently diagnosed with late-stage ovarian cancer, she
is being treated with an experimental drug cocktail administered
in "eight cycles. Eight neat little strophes." The chemo
makes her feel worse than she ever thought possible; in fact, the
treatment is making her sick, not the disease--an irony she says
she'd appreciate in a Donne sonnet, if not so much in life.
Throughout, Vivian finds, the doctors study and
discuss her body like a text: "Once I did the teaching, now I
am taught. This is much easier. I just hold still and look
cancerous. It requires less acting every time." As her time
draws to a close, a sea change begins to work in the way Vivian
thinks about life, death, and indeed, Donne. His complex, tightly
knotted poems have always been a puzzle for her formidable
intellect, a chance to display "verbal swordplay" and
wit. Her sickness presents an entirely different challenge. A
powerful, prickly personality, capable of dry asides even during a
bout of gut-wrenching nausea ("You may remark that my
vocabulary has taken a turn for the Anglo-Saxon"), Vivian
develops a new appreciation for the simple, the maudlin, the kind.
Not to give away the plot, but the final moments in Margaret
Edson's debut are as wrenching--as human--as anything in recent
drama. --Mary Park
